Our New Girl, Bush Theatre, review

Our New Girl at the Bush Theatre features a harrowing performance by Kate
Fleetwood.

Nancy Harris’s powerful new play had barely begun before I had to avert my gaze because I could not bear to look. A sweet-looking eight-year-old boy comes on stage in his dressing gown, takes a large kitchen knife off the rack and prepares to cut his ear off. I stared fixedly at the floor as is my wont on such occasions, but there was then a blackout.

The play flashes back in time and the audience has to spend the rest of the evening wondering if poor mixed-up Daniel is going to perform the terrible deed at the end of the drama.

Harris shows that desperate families don’t only exist on sink estates. Richard is a successful cosmetic surgeon who salves his conscience and nurtures his large ego by making frequent trips to Haiti to perform more vitally needed surgery on injured earthquake survivors. Meanwhile his wife Hazel, once a high-powered lawyer, struggles to cope with her difficult son as she awaits the imminent arrival of a new baby, while also attempting to run a doomed business importing olive oil from Sicily. And then there is the nanny, whom Richard has hired without consulting his wife.

Matters go from bad to worse. Daniel is in trouble at school and it becomes increasingly clear that his mother finds it hard to relate to her son. Meanwhile, a touch inevitably, her husband’s gaze turns towards the help.

The piece proves both gripping and deeply unsettling, especially when the confused boy secretly spies on his dad and the nanny as they get up to things they shouldn’t. I certainly wouldn’t want a young son of mine to appear in this disturbing adult play.

Director Charlotte Gwinner efficiently racks up the tension and there are fine performances from Mark Bazeley as the irritatingly pleased-with-himself husband, Denise Gough as the young Irish nanny who has dark traumas of her own, and especially Kate Fleetwood, who harrowingly captures a woman being pushed to breaking point by the terrible knowledge that she lacks maternal feeling. Watching Fleetwood’s clenched, desperate performance one longs to see her as Medea.